The perfect obsession

15 March 2011 — 12:00am

Decca Aitkenhead talks to the award-winning British chef about his new TV show, why no one is allowed to shout in his kitchen - and how he learnt to control his violent temper.

A week after opening his new restaurant in London and the night before we meet, Heston Blumenthal hosted what is known as a ''chef night''. A sort of gastro-celebrity Oscars party, it was a gathering of premier-league chefs in honour of his arrival in the British capital and Blumenthal and his team served them dishes he has been researching, devising and perfecting for several years.

A table for two generates revenue of £250,000 a year.

It was the realisation of a project so grand in ambition and microscopic in detail, that even people who get highly excited about food might pause to wonder at the single-minded obsession of this chef. He served mackerel marinated in bergamot and then smoked over particularly mellow hay, and sirloin steak seared over a fire of five kinds of wood, and carrots vacuum-sealed and slow-cooked in a water bath. Then he realised he hadn't eaten a thing. And so all that passed Blumenthal's own lips that entire day was a little chocolate brownie he found in his hotel room when he went to bed at 2am.

''Someone once said to me, 'You might have attention-deficit disorder.' I said, 'If that's the case, how come I can put so many hours in for so many years?' He said, 'That's classic ADD. You'll have the attention span of a gnat for stuff that you're not interested in but then you'll find something that really gets you and then you go absolutely the other way.'''

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Does he think they might have been on to something? ''I dunno but it's an interesting idea.''

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was some truth in the diagnosis, for there is something decidedly unusual about Blumenthal. He became fascinated by gastronomy at 16 when his parents took him to a Michelin-starred restaurant in Provence - an experience he can still describe in forensic detail, right down to the sommelier's moustache. ''I chose red mullet with a sauce vierge, lamb in puff pastry and crepes baumaniere. And I thought, 'This is it!'''

He didn't go on to train as a chef, though. First he bought a book about Michelin-starred chefs and studied it obsessively. He spent his 20s earning a living as a credit controller but in his spare time teaching himself about the science of food and the outlandish possibilities to be discovered by introducing industrial technology to the kitchen.

At 29, when many professional chefs are approaching the downward slopes of their career, he had still never been employed in a kitchen. He sold his home and moved his wife and two children in with his parents so that he could spend the money opening his own restaurant.

At first, The Fat Duck, in the sleepy English village of Bray in Berkshire, to the west of London, looked like a modest and unremarkable establishment and in the early years came close to bankruptcy. But gradually its menu, which famously featured snail porridge and bacon and egg ice-cream, began to earn not just a reputation for culinary alchemy but first one, then two, and now three Michelin stars. In 2005, it was named best restaurant in the world.

Since 2008, he has been familiar to an audience wider than one that can afford The Fat Duck's £160-a-head ($255) tasting menu, joining Britain's Channel 4 stable of celebrity chefs alongside Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Gordon Ramsay and winning a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award nomination and a Royal Television Society award for his 2009 series Heston's Feasts. He became the face of Waitrose supermarkets, creating a Christmas pudding last year that sold out so fast it prompted punch-ups in supermarket aisles and eBay bidding in which the puddings changed hands for up to £1000.

At the end of January, he opened Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in a five-star Knightsbridge hotel, sending food critics into delirium (see review, far right) and his new series, Heston's Mission Impossible, which began screening in Britain last month, shows him trying to revolutionise food in a children's hospital, a submarine, an airline and a cinema.

But he has always struck me as an unlikely TV personality. There is an ascetic quality about the 44-year-old, with his shaved head and little spectacles, that can make him seem a little stiff, almost even slightly sinister.

So it's a surprise when he bounds into the dining room of Dinner with a cheerful kiss for a greeting, altogether looser and less inscrutable than the version we see on our screens.

He is, he agrees, nothing like the old-fashioned stereotype of the blustering, shouty chef. ''This kitchen is completely calm. Some of the old-fashioned chefs - they become kings in their kitchen, they've got to be called chef. But I don't care if someone calls me chef or Heston, it really doesn't bother me. I haven't raised my voice for eight to 10 years in the kitchen. And I won't have anybody shouting. If I hear of anybody having a go at anyone else, they'll get disciplined.''

The bigger surprise comes when he admits he hasn't always been so serene.

''When I was younger I could always look after myself physically but emotionally it was more difficult.

He cured himself of his temper by seeing a cranial osteopath, a therapist and even a faith healer. ''And you'll never see me shouting at people. I don't want to go back to that.''

Was he ever actually violent? ''Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.'' After some slightly embarrassed resistance, he tells a story from years ago, before he opened The Fat Duck, about some men coming to his parents' house and threatening his father over a dispute about an unpaid builder's bill.

''I had my son with me and had to take him indoors and he was crying and I just thought, 'Right, this is it.' I put him down and this weird thing happened - everything just slowed down, my eyes went red and everything was in complete slow motion. The crazy thing was, the feeling was fantastic. It wasn't like, 'Oh, I'm so cross!' It went the other way, slow motion, eyes went red, almost grinning.''

It was a nice feeling? ''Yeah, dangerously nice. So I went into the cupboard where my old man kept his shotgun, a Beretta, pulled it out, loaded both barrels and stood at the door. I shot the gun, they got in the car and drove off and I got in my car and followed them.

''I found them in the car park in the village and I said, 'You've got a choice: we can have this out right now here, or you can come and talk about it. So I drove them back to my dad's, sat them down in the kitchen with a meat cleaver in my hand and talked about it. By the end, everyone shook hands.'' He shakes his head in almost dazed wonderment.

''It's not like that happened every time I got angry but it's dangerous when the feeling's really good. The extreme stuff was always the slow motion - and then it's like being on some high … But it's weird. Nothing is left of that anger. It's all gone.''

Talking to Blumenthal, you get the impression his whole life divides into pre- and post-Duck. It's almost as if he's recalling someone else when he tells that tale - yet when he talks about the Duck, he becomes so animated that nothing else appears to matter. He ate there three weeks ago, for his son's 18th birthday. ''And it was the first time in 15 years that I can hand-on-heart say I'm happy with the restaurant.''

It still isn't actually making any money, he cheerfully admits - partly because his wage bills and other overheads are astronomical but also because he keeps removing tables. On an average day, the receptionists manage to answer about 400 booking phone calls but they have a computer system that logs all the calls that fail to get through - and on a typical day, these number 24,000.

Given that a table for two generates revenue of £250,000 a year, you'd think it might be an idea to squeeze in a few more, and he agrees.

''It breaks all the rules of running a restaurant.'' And yet the restaurant is now down to 42 seats. ''Because with fewer covers we can pay more attention to detail,'' he says.

''The Duck allows everything else to happen - so everything I do is to pay the Duck back and protect it. Everything else I do - all the other areas of the business - are about protecting the Duck. The Duck is my baby.''